Marta Aleksandrowicz

Marta Aleksandrowicz is a researcher in the fields of psychoanalysis, comparative literature, and decolonial and feminist theory. She is currently in formation as a psychoanalyst. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from University at Buffalo in 2022, where she was involved with the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis & Culture. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the ICI Berlin from 2022-24

Her research appeared in Angelaki, Penumbr(a): A Journal of Psychoanalysis and Modernity, The Polish Review, and JCLA. She also served as the co-editor of the special issue of Penumbr(a) on beauty (2022). She is an active member of the New York Circle of the Freudian School of Quebec (EFQ) and of the Sinthome Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis.

This project builds upon Aleksandrowicz’s research on post-socialist Eastern European and decolonial Latin American scholarships and literatures as a lens to re-think universality from the locus of disquieting and generative fragments, borders, and cracks. Neither abstract nor exclusionary, this paradoxical model of universality attempts to contest historical associations of the universal with neoliberal globalization, white Western masculinity, utopianism, and homogeneity. Thus, it creates the basis for new ethical linkages and cosmopolitan forms of transnational community and solidarity.

The project engages such a paradoxical model of universality with psychoanalysis to forge a discussion in which social and political liberation is profoundly intertwined with a personal transformation that has a crucial aesthetic and feminine dimension. The second part of the project focuses on literary works by Clarice Lispector and 2019 Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk to examine their feminine articulations of universality that emerge through a creative practice of writing from the limits of identity, consciousness, and language.